Four Seasons Restaurant, NYC Power Lunch Center, to Close: NYT

(Bloomberg) -- The Four Seasons Restaurant in Manhattan, the Midtown restaurant that defined the power lunch, will close less than a year after it reopened in a new location, the New York Times reported. Tuesday’s lunch is expected to be its last.

The restaurant, which opened in its original Seagram Building location in 1959 and whose regulars included Home Depot founder Ken Langone and Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, left its first home in 2016 when the building’s owner declined to renew its lease. A nostalgia-soaked 15-hour auction for the fixtures totaled $4.1 million, with chairs fetching more than $3,000 each.

Last Service at the Four Seasons

The restaurant reopened last year on East 49th Street and the regulars came back with it, from Steve Forbes to Donald Marron. But it wasn’t enough.

In an emailed statement to the Times, managing partner Alex von Bidder said the restaurant wasn’t doing enough business to satisfy its investors. The restaurant itself was great, he told the Times, “but we just couldn’t make it; the restaurant world has changed.”

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